Macphail on the Mysteries of Charles Mingus
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MacPhail on the Mysteries of Charles Mingus John McDonough harles Mingus and the jazz scene of the late ’50s were a restless pair. They took by brief pride in their innovations only to become quickly bored with them and C move on in search of some farther frontier. Jazz was evolving into a cultish and Part of an ongoing series spotlighting lonely art music then, in fearless flight from the commercial oversight that had made it performances supported by the NEA’s so massively popular in the ’30s and ’40s. American Masterpieces: Mingus began where the American frontier had ended, at the shores of the Pacific in Chamber Music initiative California, where he was raised in the Watts section of Los Angeles and where he made his first recordings as bassist and composer in 1945. Already bebop, a fully accomplished The November and December calendar fact with little to be added, was arriving from the East. In the first decade of his career, of American Masterpieces Mingus was an offspring of its impact. By the mid-50s he was an honored virtuoso of activities can be seen on page 12. virtuoso music, but not a ground-breaker. Some of the works being performed are He was part of the young generation that first confronted some of the logical conclusions acknowledged American classics, of jazz’s manifest destiny as defined by tonality and chord progressions. He had two others are worthy but little known choices: march west into the sea, metaphorically speaking, into an abyss of abstraction; and rarely performed, and still others or head back east, metaphorically and literally, into the sources of the music’s history. In are very recent commissions. choosing the second, Mingus became a one-man avant-garde who found his frontier in the music’s own tradition—gospel, New Orleans, Ellington, and Charlie Parker—and proceeded to deconstruct, redefine and rebuild it in ways no one could have imagined and some first found uncomfortable. In 1959 New York Times critic John S. Wilson called his music “shock-implemented chaos.” That was then. This year the NEA announced $2 million in support for 72 chamber music programs, and among the grants three will be devoted entirely to the work of Mingus. This is a formidable gesture to a composer whose compositions have perhaps been more honored than performed—more on that in moment. It would seem that the most wide ranging of the NEA-sponsored events will be a four-concert series in Antonello Hall at the MacPhail Center for Music, Minneapolis, MN, between October and March, 2010-11. Organized by MacPhail’s jazz coordinator, Adam Linz, himself a bass player, each concert will offer a different aspect of the vast and malleable world of Mingusology. Born in 1975, Linz was only four when Mingus died at the age of 56. He came to the electric bass in the late ’80s with a skull full of Jaco and Van Halen. “It was my uncle [bassist Tom Hubbard] who brought me to jazz,” he says, “and he took me to the JVC 10 november/december 2010 Jazz Festivals and I raided his record collection and discovered the Mingus Big Band and the smaller Mingus Dynasty. They Miles and Mingus.” Mingus became a primary focus of Linz, first have transcribed from records and orchestrated according to their as a musician than as a composer. This tracks the long arc of sense of what Mingus might have done. Homzy gathered and Mingus’s reputation as well, from Charlie Mingus, bassist, to collated the scraps that comprise Mingus’s two- to two-and-a- Charles Mingus composer. half-hour magnum opus, Epitaph. Schuller conducted it in 1989, For a musician who thought of himself as a composer, Mingus and Sickler gathered 55 other compositions into Charles Mingus: left little behind in the way of cataloged musical texts or orches- More Than a Fake Book in 1991. Together they have helped his trations—mostly scraps of lead sheets and a recorded legacy of music become a presence in high school and college jazz programs. performances. His notion of “composition” challenged the for- Using Sickler’s work as an anchor, Linz plans to explore Mingus mality and weight of the word. “If you like Beethoven, Bach or in four configurations: a trio concert in October, a quintet in Brahms, that’s ok,” he wrote in a 1972 album note. “They were all November, a nonet in February, and a septet in March. But the pencil composers. I always wanted to be a spontaneous composer.” larger question is, How does one grab the elusive Mingus genie In pursuit of spontaneity, Mingus promoted his musicians from when Mingus is not there to lead the search? The answer, accord- the rank of interpreters to collaborators. (Among the surviving ing to Linz, is to go for the spirit, not the letter, of the music. veterans of those prime Mingus sessions are Benny Golson, John “Adagio Ma Non Troppo,” for example, was recorded with a huge Handy, Eddie Bert, Ted Curson, and Jack Walrath.) He instruct- ed, explained, exhorted, demanded, bullied, often intimidated, then let go. His collective approach to composing connected the Charles Mingus, earliest New Orleans jazz bands with a nascent avant-garde speck- New York City, 1976 led with a jarring cacophony, though little was put to paper in the process. It made for some tumultuous performances, but often left more questions than answers for those who came later looking for more than the tune—for the “composition.” Yet, says Linz, “the structures Mingus brought to the work were well defined when he brought them to his players. Anything that got added was icing on the cake from the musicians.” Still, performing Mingus today is not like doing the settled scores of Fletcher Henderson, Duke Ellington or Gil Evans. This may be why relatively few Mingus titles have become standards. You will find only a handful of recordings of most of the thirty or so pieces Linz is considering for the MacPhail concert series. There are only about 21 recordings of “Pithecanthropus Erectus,” nine of “Weird Nightmare,” and four of “Please Don’t Come Back from the Moon” from Epitaph. The most-performed Mingus piece is “Goodbye Porkpie Hat” from the 1959 Mingus Ah Um album on Columbia at 162 recordings. But by comparison with contem- poraries, Miles Davis’s “Milestones” has logged an estimated 257 recordings; John Coltrane’s “Naima,” 377; Dizzy Gillespie’s “A Night in Tunisia,” 752; and Thelonious Monk’s “Round Midnight,” nearly 1,400, making it one of the 10 most performed titles in jazz history. One could argue that these are songs, and not comparable to the larger visions Mingus had in mind. But what he had in mind was often a product of the moment and not easily re-creatable. The present coherence of Mingus’s body of work is largely a posthumous legacy, built by his widow and primary advocate, Sue Graham Mingus, and by musicians and musicologists such as Andrew Homzy, Gunther Schuller, Don Sickler, and the men of 11 orchestra in 1971. But Linz has it on his short list for the trio concert. Counter- intuitive? Perhaps. “But the key elements are always going to be there in his music,” says Linz. Moreover, the orchestral version originated in 1963 as a piano solo (“Myself Performances in When I Am Real”), later transcribed by a November & December fan and orchestrated. “We could present the recordings,” Linz says. “But we don’t want to lose that spirit of the band sound NOVEMBER 1 Gary, IN NOVEMBER 14 Boca Raton, FL Emerson School for the Visual & p r e s e n t e r Lynn University Conservatory of Music and the adventurousness that comes from Performing Arts p r o g r a m A Celebration of American Masterworks playing the music. It’s the ability to find NOVEMBER 2 Valparaiso, IN Spotlight: American Chamber Music top student spontaneity in music that’s fifty years old Valparaiso University projects of the fall semester. Works by George NOVEMBER 7 Muncie, IN Crumb, John Cage, Aaron Copland, Amy Beach [and to] take it to somewhere it hasn’t and Leon Kirchner been. That’s the spirit of Mingus…hope- Ball State University www.lynn.edu/academics/colleges/conservatory NOVEMBER 15 Evansville, IN fully going with the vibe of Mingus, sort University of Evansville NOVEMBER 17 & 19 New York, NY of teaching each other the parts and taking p r e s e n t e r Ball State University/Musical Arts Quintet p r e s e n t e r /p e r f o r m e r s Western Wind Vocal Ensemble p r o g r a m Adolphe, Night Journey; Barber, Summer Music; the time to really learn it.” p r o g r a m The Happy Journey: American vocal music, After suggesting that “going for a vibe” Beach, Pastorale; Brandon, Five Frogs; Higdon, Autumn including New England anthems and folk hymns, Music a r t i s t s Mihoko Watanabe, flute; Johanna Cox, sounded like a colorful euphemism for Shaker songs. Southern spirituals, 19th-century parlor oboe; Elizabeth Crawford, clarinet; Gene Berger, horn; songs, new music and pop and jazz arrangements guesswork, I asked if Mingus perhaps Keith Sweger, bassoon. [email protected] www.westernwind.org represented something of a redefinition of www.bsu.edu/music DECEMBER 2 New York, NY the idea of composing. NOVEMBER 3 Denton, TX p r e s e n t e r /p e r f o r m e r s Chamber Music Society of “Totally,” Linz responded.